Richard Jaffe, Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese BuddhismNeither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism by Richard JaffeReview by: (Richard PayneHistory of Religions, Vol. 43, No. 2 (November 2003), pp. 167-170Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/423015 .Accessed: 07/08/2012 09:24

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History of Religions 167

One thing that troubles the Indian reader is the carelessness with which names,expressions, and sentences (sometimes, but not always, in the vernacular) are re-ported. They are often wrong. So for instance, Maoist Communist Centre becomesMarxist Communist Centre (p. 45), or karana (cause) becomes karna, which is adifferent word altogether (p. 59). Kis rup mein yaad karte hain is translated as “peo-ple remember God in whatever way they choose” and indicated as Urdu (p. 157);it is in fact more Sanskritic and, what is more, wrong. It could possibly have beenkisee bhi rup mein yaad kar lete hain.

Such shortcomings apart, it is an eminently readable book that has material tothink about for a much wider set of readers than just students of history of religions.

Aditya Nigam

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi

Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism.By Richard Jaffe. Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press,2001. Pp. xxiii+288, 6 halftones, 1 line illustration. $42.50.

In 1872 the Meiji government changed the laws regarding Buddhist priests, de-criminalizing meat eating, marrying, growing out their hair, wearing ordinary cloth-ing, and other practices that had previously been punishable by the civil authority.This pivotal change in social policy formed Japanese Buddhism as we know it to-day, including the fact that almost all male Buddhist clergy are married. NeitherMonk nor Layman concerns itself with the social and institutional history of Jap-anese Buddhism during a period when the social pressures of modernization andimperialism were being experienced by religious traditions all over the globe.

Richard Jaffe’s work examines the transformation of Japanese Buddhist prac-tice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and demonstrates the cen-trality that this decriminalization played in the fundamental changes that tookplace at that time. In the discourse of the era the paired issues of meat eating(nikujiki ) and clerical marriage (saitai ) became a slogan (nikujiki saitai) underwhich the many strains created by the government’s various efforts to modernizeJapanese Buddhism were debated. Issues that had previously either been ignoredor simply not seen as problematic, such as the ownership of temple property andthe status of the widows of clerics, were brought into the realm of public discus-sion. While the general outlines of the Meiji era transformation of Buddhism arefamiliar, Jaffe details three very important aspects of these changes. First, that thechanges made vis-à-vis the Buddhist establishment were part of a much largerpattern of modernizing changes made in the law and in social policy. Second,how the changes—as diverse as they were—came to be constellated for the Bud-dhist community around the twin issues of meat eating and clerical marriage.And, third, that while some Buddhist clerics actively opposed the changes, therewere others who actively promoted them. Jaffe reveals the complex and at timesconflicting motivations for either resistance or promotion.

Jaffe proceeds chronologically, beginning with a review of the historical back-ground to the Meiji-era debates. While prior to 1872 the civil authority had

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asserted its function in maintaining the morality of the clergy and its adherence tothe precepts, the application of the law was far from consistent. Many instancesof covertly married clergy were known, and often the transmission of an abbacyproceeded from father to son. Exceptions were also made for those groups ofclergy who had historically practiced clerical marriage—both ministers of theJodo Shinshu tradition founded by Shinran and practitioners of the Shugendo tra-dition of mountain ascetics. (Jaffe’s title alludes to Shinran’s self-description.)The Jodo Shinshu had already been involved in debates over these issues in theEdo period.

Typically, the belief system of Jodo Shinshu is presented as being almost solelybased on the idea that mappo (the “decline of the dharma,” a period of corruptionof the Buddhist teaching) has begun. However, Jaffe discloses a much more elab-orate and nuanced rationale being argued. Chiku (1634–1718), a leading scholarof the Nishi Honganji branch of Jodo Shinshu, wrote a work that set the model forlater similar defenses of Jodo Shinshu. Having pointed out the hypocrisy of thosewho criticized Jodo Shinshu ministers for doing publicly what they themselvesdid privately, he went on to provide many canonic instances of esteemed monkswho broke the precepts regarding vegetarianism and celibacy. Chiku’s conclusionis that the precepts are not absolute but are to be applied in accord with the ideaof skillful means (Sanskrit, upaya; Japanese, hoben): “depending upon the timeand the type of person who is the target of the teaching, the precepts are some-times advocated and sometimes relaxed . . . being used to lead sentient beings tothe Buddhist teaching” (p. 49). Intra-Buddhist debates were already going on priorto the government’s act of decriminalization.

Following what is called the Meiji restoration, sweeping changes in the orga-nization of Japanese religion were instituted: “Between 1868 and 1884 Meijigovernment leaders almost totally reconstructed state policy concerning clericalstatus, the definition of the Buddhist clergy, and Buddhist institutional structure.. . . Like the forced separation of Buddhism and Shinto, the dissolution of specialBuddhist clerical status and the division between the laity and the clergy by Meijiofficials were crucial elements in the emergence of modern Japanese religiousconsciousness” (p. 59). The government’s goal was to create a new sense of iden-tity, that of being a citizen of the Japanese state as a whole rather than maintain-ing primary allegiance to more local social institutions.

In keeping with this goal, the government instituted a new system of educa-tion, the Doctrinal Instructor system, which initially attempted to use both Shintoand Buddhist priests to educate the general populace. This effort was tied to therationale of State Shinto as simply part of Japanese identity and separate from re-ligion as such. This distinction between State Shinto as culture and other reli-gions was made in response to diplomatic efforts by the United States and Europe,which, at the behest of Christian missionaries seeking to create openings in Jap-anese society, actively promoted the ideas of separation of church and state andfreedom of religion.

Other strains on Buddhism were created by the Meiji regime’s shifting policies,produced by both the experimental nature of some of the changes and by intra-governmental debates. Different governmental bodies gave conflicting interpreta-tions of the new policies. Similarly, in an effort to simplify the complexity of the

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institutions they were seeking to govern, Shugendo groups were forced to mergeinto either Tendai or Shingon. This introduced overtly married clergy into theselatter two sects at the same time that the change in civil law occurred. One re-sponse to the strains created by these legal and cultural changes was made bymany conservative Buddhist leaders, who attempted to interpret decriminalizationas meaning that responsibility had now been transferred from the civil authorityto the ecclesiastical. As a result of confusing applications of the law, the actualintent of some of the Meiji authorities to transform Buddhism, and resistance frombelow by many ordinary monks, this interpretation never succeeded.

The intention of the Meiji government to modernize the whole of Japanese so-ciety, without excluding the traditional practices of the Buddhist clergy, is evi-denced by the imposition of family names and the loss of any special legal status.Together with marriage, these changes gave rise to debates over temple property—what should properly belong to a priest and his family, and what was properly thepossession of the temple. Where previously the line of abbots was responsible forproperty that belonged to the temple, now a distinction was created between thefamily of the abbot as one legal entity and the temple as another. The later effectsof this distinction can be seen during World War II and the postwar period. Be-cause their husbands were absent, many wives of priests took on the ceremonialresponsibilities for their temple in an attempt to maintain a priestly family’srights to residence in and use of temple property.

Neither Monk nor Layman is an important book for understanding the spe-cific history of modern Japanese Buddhism, the dynamics of the modernization ofBuddhism, and the effects of nineteenth-century internationalism. Other works,for example, James Ketelaar’s Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan (Prince-ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), Helen Hardacre’s Shinto and theState, 1868–1988 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), and NottoThelle’s Buddhism and Christianity in Japan (Honolulu: University of HawaiiPress, 1987), have also discussed the religious transformations of the same era inJapanese history. However, Jaffe’s work complements these in a very importantfashion. He provides us with insight into the debates over the governmentally im-posed changes that took place within Buddhist traditions, and into the conflictingroles played by various Buddhists in both resisting and promoting these changes.

While it is sometimes considered to be anomalous that almost all male Japa-nese Buddhist clergy are married, this is a characteristic shared by rNyingmapaand Newari Buddhist clergy—the latter studied by David N. Gellner in his Monk,Householder, and Tantric Priest: Newar Buddhism and Its Hierarchy of Ritual(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Jaffe’s work reveals the histor-ical process by which the Japanese practice of married clergy was created.

Under the pressures of imperialist expansion of Euro-American culture, includ-ing the religious culture of Evangelical Christianity, the late nineteenth centurysaw the creation of new forms of Buddhism. The best studied of these is theloosely unified movement now known as “Buddhist modernism” (see HeinzBechert, Buddhismus, Staat und Gesellschaft in den Ländern des Theravada-Buddhismus, vol. 1 [Frankfurt am Main and Berlin: Metzner, 1966]; pts. 3 and 4).This movement is usually characterized as sharing a commitment to interpretingBuddhism as an agnostic, rationalist ethical philosophy. This representation of

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Buddhism still pervades the academic study of religion. Without directly address-ing these issues, Jaffe’s work provides a more complex understanding of both thechanges of Buddhism in the late nineteenth century and the understanding ofwhat Buddhism is. Rather than being a straightforward self-revisioning towardmodernity, we find a very complex and contested set of positions driven by so-cial, political, and economic factors.

Richard Payne

Graduate Theological Union

Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico,1800–1876. By Terry Rugeley. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.Pp. xxvii+335, 15 photos, 4 maps. $55.00 (cloth); $26.95 (paper).

In Of Wonders and Wise Men, Terry Rugeley shows the role that religionplayed in post-colonial Yucatán, a time of political and social turmoil in whichboth the leaders and the popular classes forged a sense of order by weaving to-gether strands of folkloric spiritual tradition, the icons and symbols of formal re-ligion, and the anticlerical impulses of the newly independent Mexico. His bookconnects the events of the southeastern region to those of the whole country, illus-trating how average individuals experienced the important changes taking place,and how the common person created meaning and sense in the face of radicaltransformation.

Rugeley focuses on the political and cultural impact of popular religion in theYucatán peninsula after Mexico’s independence from Spain and before its revo-lution. He is sensitive to questions of class struggle and ethnic diversity andshows how different social sectors negotiated their relationships to each other andto ecclesiastical and political authority. A fine example is the Catholic Church’srole as the arbiter of the holy, often denying humble parishioners’ experiences.There is no particular hypothesis set forth in the book. Of Wonders and Wise Menwill interest scholars of Mexican history, sociology, and religion; students ofpopular culture; and historians of religion and of the church.

Rugeley is respectful of popular cultures, recognizing their multiplicity andhonoring the people who lived by them. He understands the complexity of beliefand of the political negotiation religious praxis can entail and puts these mattersinto historical context exquisitely. His analysis of what inspires faith demon-strates an admirable lack of sentimentality and superb insight. He grasps detailsof the Mayan imaginary that few foreigners do, for example, how toponyms re-veal the local idiosyncrasy (p. 6). His restraint when writing about unsavorypriests reveals the threads of personal-economic and micropolitical interests thatgive rise to behavior that, in a culture of greater oversight, could be disciplinedand punished.

The writing style is often lively and pleasant but occasionally unpolished andconfusing. Several times I wished that he had revealed his sources more consis-tently. His comparisons with popular religion in other parts of Latin America,with Buddhism, and with what he refers to as karma are rarely helpful and at